Messaging systems such as electronic mail (e-mail) have revolutionized the way in which people communicate. One of the advantages of e-mail is that functions that will take the user considerable time using other messaging systems can be automated within an e-mail environment, making the system more convenient and user-friendly. However, there is an ongoing need to automate more functions, and to assist the user in executing frequently executed tasks involving multiple steps, such that a procedure that might previously have taken two or three steps, will now take only one step.
In messaging systems, specific messages are usually saved within a particular folder, such that all of the messages saved within that folder are alike in relevant respects. To select the correct folder, a user must typically sort through a number of folders, identify the correct folder, and then allocate the message to this folder. The number of steps required to perform this function can often be reduced to one by providing a folder pre-select function. The pre-select function would select a candidate for a folder to which to allocate the message. Subsequently, the user could either approve the selection, or follow the above-described feature of going through the folders to identify the correct folder. If the pre-selected folder is frequently correct, in that the user approves its selection, then the pre-select function makes the messaging system more user friendly and efficient.
In some contexts, it may be desirable to pre-select a folder for a current message based on how all of the existing messages have been stored. For example, it may be desirable to order all of the messages on the system according to an attribute of these messages—this attribute might be the sender or the subject or some other attribute. However, if this is done, then these indices must be maintained if there are any changes. This is expensive both in terms of processing and memory, and also may lead to errors. Further, in desktop systems where there are thousands of messages this could be highly impractical due to limitations imposed by processing speed, network bandwidth, memory and other factors.
In general, there will often be cases in which it is desirable to implement a folder pre-select function in a system in which resources are scarce. As a result, there remains a need to develop folder pre-selection functions that consume fewer resources.